Tewes, William (Bill), Part 2

ORAL HISTORY OF WILLIAM (BILL) TEWES
PART 2
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
December 5, 2011
MR. MCDANIEL: All right. This is Keith McDaniel and today is December the 5th 2011. We're at the home of Mr. Bill Tewes once again. We were here some few months ago and got part of this interview done and oral history done and we're here to finish it up. Are you ready to finish it up?
MR. TEWES: I sure am.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Now do you remember where we stopped last time?
MR. TEWES: Well, we got me to Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: We did get you to Oak Ridge.
MR. TEWES: And I was - I had spent my first I think five weeks at K-25 doing leak testing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes.
MR. TEWES: I was on shift work and I guess the thing I didn't comment on was if you were on shift work the whole city was functioning almost 24 hours a day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because a lot of people worked shifts, didn't they?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. I can recall one day in SED - maybe I better explain that to people who just see this one. I was a member of the Special Engineer Detachment 9812. There were I think around 1,500 of us. Our roster was 12 something, but there were a lot of people off roster.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh. Is that right?
MR. TEWES: We all were technically trained and we worked in all four of the plants and also at the Castle on the Hill as technical personnel.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: We were all enlisted men. Maybe about half of us had promotions to various levels.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. But you had special skills. That's the reason that you were there because you had special technical skills that the Army thought was important to the project and that's the reason you were here.
MR. TEWES: We had two different groups. They got here two different ways. There was a smaller group who had been working at one of the plants or one of the feeder plants and they got drafted. They gave them about four weeks to teach them the basics of being in the Army.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: And then ship them back here. Well Dick Lord was one of them. Dick mentioned, he said, "We all came back and we all had very low seniority." The other group was selected from the Army's - the Army does a very good job during the induction period in shaping the individuals' skills and they also gave everybody an AGCT test, Army General Classification Test. It was like an ACT or something like that -
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Kind of a standardized test to see where your strengths were.
MR. TEWES: We were smart. The average AGCT was 133. I've seen some statements that we were smarter than the officers here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, it wouldn't surprise me.
MR. TEWES: Although probably 90 percent of them were in the reserve, had very responsible jobs in peacetime and they were able to fit right in. They were an excellent group.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well good.
MR. TEWES: Now I forgot where I was -
MR. MCDANIEL: I think before we got to where you met your wife. We got to that point where you had met your wife at a dance I believe.
MR. TEWES: Yeah. Actually, I met Olive Belle Littleton on Thanksgiving of 1945.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. You told us that story. I remember that now.
MR. TEWES: Okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: I remember that story.
MR. TEWES: That's a good point to let me continue that story.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right. Good.
MR. TEWES: I had dated her every day for the week after that dance and she told me that she had a date Tuesday night. I asked her, I said, "Are we still on for the big SED formal dinner dance?" She sort of lightened up and said, "Bill, if you'd like we're on for Monday night and Wednesday night and Thursday night and the big SED dinner dance on Friday night." We couldn't rent the Grove on Saturday. That was the big dance every week, but this was a big deal. Now, we got corsages from Evelyn's Florist that was located at Town Site and the girls either had long dresses or very dressy dresses. I know - did I get from Olive to Audrey? Which is what I call their -
MR. MCDANIEL: I don't think so.
MR. TEWES: Okay. Let me take a second for that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: The first dance I went to with her, there was a GI there who had a terrific line and he came over and said to me, "Bill, I don't know how you do it. You had a good lookin' blonde last week and here you've got a great improvement." Audrey was obviously impressed. And he said, "May I dance with your date?" I said, "Sure, Tony." Ollie started to tell him what her name was. Said, "I know her name. Her name is Audrey, little Audrey." There was a comic book.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: And she looked just like the girl -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: She had short, black hair, good-looking face. So, when she came back she told me, she said, "Boy, if I'm ever feelin' down, if I could get one dance my morale would be improved." But after the break, why, I said, "Wanna dance, Audrey?" And she obviously liked the name. So that's how she became Audrey.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. What I found out about her and names was she started working here on - well, I don't have the precise date, but it was during January of '44.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Okay.
MR. TEWES: She worked for - she had gone through college at Eastern Kentucky in about three years. She went summer schools and graduated in - it would have been December of '43.
MR. MCDANIEL: '43, right.
MR. TEWES: Her clearance was completed and she came down here in January '44.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now where did she work?
MR. TEWES: She worked for Tennessee Eastman in their employment department, which was located in Town Site where the Tunnell Building is now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: She was in a section that was called Travel Allowance. Whenever they hired people here, they seemed to always promise them a house that hadn't even been designed -
MR. MCDANIEL: Built. Exactly.
MR. TEWES: As a result, they got extra funds to provide not just for their living, but to provide for their family's living --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: -- in another location.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: They were - every one of them when they filled out their expense account stretched as far as they could.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. TEWES: There's a group there. There was Audrey, you may have heard of or met Evelyn Ellingson.
MR. MCDANIEL: Hm-mm.
MR. TEWES: I know that she did an oral history, both her and Bob, I think in Washington. The only other one I know of that group was a fella' called Murphy Smith, but they - Audrey would have been very good at that. When it came to numbers, she just seemed never to make a mistake and she was very competitive. Well, I think that this is a good point to talk about the organization here about the plant management. The Manhattan Project assigned a senior engineer to each one of the four plants here in Oak Ridge and they went out and they hired major corporations to design them, another one to build them, sometimes they did both, and to operate them in Oak Ridge, Tennessee Eastman was the operating contractor at Y-12. Union Carbide was at K-25. The University of Chicago started at X-10 and then Monsanto took over and a lot of the management came from the University of Chicago and worked on there. H. J. Ferguson was the construction contractor for S-50. S-50 seems to be forgotten these days, but it provided a very valuable partial enrichment that could be fed directly into the beta units at Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: They decided that Fercleve would operate it, the Manhattan Project did and to avoid a potential union problem they formed a wholly owned subsidiary called Fer for Ferguson and Cleve for Cleveland where the home office was. The interesting thing about Ferguson is that they were given an almost impossible schedule.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. And that was a large facility. It was big. S-50 was big.
MR. TEWES: It was big. Ferguson was a very large architect/engineering firm.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: The CEO of Ferguson, Mr. Ferguson, had died about five or six months before they were contacted and his wife had taken over as CEO. She was in charge of all the operations in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: I have never ever seen her first name mentioned. The AEC and its following organizations and the government have always pushed affirmative action. Here's a case where you have a woman who's successful at a time when none of them were.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. And nobody even talks about her.
MR. TEWES: Nobody even pays any attention.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'd never heard that story before. I didn't know. So she was in charge of - she was basically in charge of the building of S-50, wasn't she?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. She came down here with her chief engineer. Colonel Nichols had a set of drawings that Groves had gotten from the Navy that initiated the thing and I'm not sure. I think Groves actually selected Ferguson.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. TEWES: He'd had previous experience.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. He'd just finished building the Pentagon so I'm sure he worked with everybody, didn't he.
MR. TEWES: But I think really in Oak Ridge we suffer from the fact that the DOE doesn't have a few historians that can dig into things like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: But so anyway, so they built S-50. They had what? Ninety days to build it?
MR. TEWES: It was 90 days to - it was started before it was finished.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: This is a good example of how what you read in the books today isn't necessarily accurate.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. TEWES: I've got it over here somewhere.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's alright. Let's just talk about it.
MR. TEWES: Okay. Well, here's a history, historic photos of the Manhattan Project. Anthony Joseph came here and gave a paper on this at the Museum about three years ago. It was very interesting. I think that he didn't deliberately make this mistake, but he probably looked into some of the literature that was incorrect already, but he makes a statement in his book that it never really worked well and it had to be shut down. The real story is that it started up in September I believe and in - that would have been '44 - and in December, they shut it down because it had a tremendous number of steam leaks.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: And they welded them closed and from then on it really had no moving parts and it just worked perfectly. Colonel Nichols estimated that it saved - it shortened the War by nine days.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: The AEC historians, the first group in their summary, The New World, estimated about a week. People today probably don't know what a week meant to people -
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure.
MR. TEWES: -- back then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: But I was back, courted my wife when I got off on that side.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. I understand.
MR. TEWES: We just really hit it off at that dance. I had a date for Sunday and on Sunday, my two best friends were Larry O'Rourke and Art Kilman. Larry started. Larry was - he came by the O'Rourke name naturally. He made friends with everyone and somehow or other he had met a couple, John Graham Smith, went by Gray, was an SED at Tennessee Eastman. If you wanted to live together with your wife and you were a member of the SED, she had to get a job here and find a room in someone's house.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: And then the SED would permit you to move to that house from the (barracks or) dorm, but they would not give you funds for quarters.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: Which they did provide at Columbia for me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. Because they didn't have any housing --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: Well, on Sundays we went to lunch at the - boy, my brain is showing its age.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's alright.
MR. TEWES: The Hughes, Mom and Pop Hughes and their son Ladd was a teenager.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really.
MR. TEWES: Live right across the street from here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really.
MR. TEWES: On the first house in on the right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really.
MR. TEWES: C house.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh. Yeah.
MR. TEWES: I guess we went riding -
MR. MCDANIEL: So you and your buddies went for lunch there on Sundays.
MR. TEWES: Well, the Hughes' had horses.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. TEWES: They were stabled outside Elza Gate. We went riding and I got there I think about ten minutes late and Audrey showed up - I was supposed to be there at 5. I think about 5:35 or something and the first words she said were, "You smell like a stable." She proceeded to take my shoes and come back.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Oh my.
MR. TEWES: But then she said, "You're late." I said, "My gosh, you didn't show up till 35 minutes after." She said, "If you weren't late I would have started getting ready sooner." That was about the only significant problem we had. And finally I was able to get through to her that she could be late any other time, but that it's bad form to go down the aisle after the bride.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: And you really should get to funerals a half an hour on time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: But the next night -
MR. MCDANIEL: Hey Bill, take your hand down if you don't mind.
MR. TEWES: Oh, I'm sorry.
MR. MCDANIEL: It's okay.
MR. TEWES: The next night she said, "Let's go get a hot chocolate out at East Village." Well, us SEDs, we didn't get around much of the town. We'd go to Town Site to the movies. We'd go to dances at the Grove or at Town Site or the Town Site Tennis Courts. We were encouraged to stay away from Jefferson. We had a local paper, the SED News. They used to call it the Jefferson Brawl Hall.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right.
MR. TEWES: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. That one was kind of rough?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. But -
MR. MCDANIEL: So she wanted to go get hot chocolate at the East Village.
MR. TEWES: Yeah. Well, I saw the Elm Grove stores and I said, "Well there we are." Audrey was amazed. She said, "Don't you ever get out in town?" I said, "No." She said, "Well we aren't even halfway there." It was out in East Village.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: But I also found that she really enjoyed walking. So the next night I wasn't going to get caught walking in the - it was a period when there weren't good movies.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: So I said, "Let's go to the Library." She looked at me like I was nuts, but she said, "Okay." When we got in the Library I - we got a couple of comfortable seats and I said, "I'll be right back." I went over and I got the Herald Tribune for myself and I got the Louisville Courier Journal for her. We had a great many different newspapers in the Library. More by far than we have today.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure. I'm sure because there were so many people from so many different places.
MR. TEWES: Right. And it had a very strong southern flavor to it, but I didn't know how much of a flavor I did because the Louisville Courier Journal, well, "The State" in South Carolina is the same way. It's a state paper.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. TEWES: And the obituaries are state wide --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. TEWES: So, we enjoyed reading the paper -
MR. MCDANIEL: Well good. Good.
MR. TEWES: -- for a while.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now when did y'all get married?
MR. TEWES: We got married in August of '46.
MR. MCDANIEL: '46. So let's talk a little bit about you courted and then the War was over. What happened then?
MR. TEWES: The end of that week I had suggested - oh, the end of that week she told me she had a date for Tuesday night. I had invited her to the SED formal. Well, I said, "Are we still on for that?" She said, "Well, if you like, we're on for Monday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, the SED dance on Friday." I was feeling lousy on Tuesday night knowing she was going out with someone else and Art Kilman found me in the PX drinking beer. Incidentally, our beer was 3.2 percent alcohol.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: The Army back before the beginning of the war, recognizing that they felt like there was going to be a war; they decided that all military bases would operate according to the local laws. For instance, that meant that we had segregation. There's nothing that the Corps of Engineers did about it or could do about it. It also meant that we were legally dry. I don't think there may have been a few people who went to a wet area often enough to get regular beer, but we may have been legally dry, but we were pretty darn wet when it came to liquor -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Sure. I understand -
MR. TEWES: If you're in the SED, your good buddies in the MP’s. The Army group that manned the gates, they'd never check one of us. Well, we courted and a few days after the SED dance and - well, it was after our - after the SED dance on Sunday. Audrey pulled out her dance card and I've got one around here somewhere. Here we - this was folded up and it says, "SED Dance 7 P.M. December 7th." I don't know of anybody who noticed the significance of December 7th, but there were a few signatures on it and one of them was from my good friend Larry O'Rourke and it said, "Apry Bill, moi." I felt that I better write something in French and this is what popped into my mind. Mon cur et tu tien. In other words, Larry said, "After Bill, me." I said, "My heart is always yours." Well, that Sunday night she said, "We need to talk about this." She waved it. I started to say, "Well Larry says" - she said, "I have had it translated by a young lady in Beacon Hall who used to teach French until she found she could make a lot more money as an operator out at Y-12 and she said, "And she is quite reliable. She isn't gonna tell anybody else about it." And she said, "She didn't just tell me that you said my heart is always yours. She said she gave me an interpretation that Larry said after Bill, me, and Bill said, ‘There's no after Bill." She said, "How do you intend to accomplish this?" And I said, "Well, the only way I can figure is I guess I have to marry you." She obviously had figured all this out -
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. TEWES: -- because she said, "Soldier, I'm not sayin' yes and I'm not sayin' no, but don't ask me again for a month."
MR. MCDANIEL: There ya' go.
MR. TEWES: I think I didn't wait a month, but she took her time about saying yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: Well, let me tell you about the day after the dance.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I don't think they're going to let me go into this much personal detail. So we need to move it along.
MR. TEWES: This isn't personal detail, all right?
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. Good.
MR. TEWES: I'll stop the personal detail.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. That's fine.
MR. TEWES: The day after the dance, we all were hung over and at 8:00 that morning, that Saturday morning, we started moving from the barracks to the Jefferson dormitories.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really.
MR. TEWES: I'm mentioning this because I think there are very few people in this town that are aware of it. We had the four dorms at the Lincoln Circle and then in addition to that, we had three dorms on the Turnpike side of Jefferson Circle. We lost our maid service. We had to - they had a schedule for cleaning the hallways and the johns and nobody minded it at all. Our rooms were kept spic and span.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: The one thing that was a tremendous improvement, in the barracks we had - there's a lot that's been written about the fact we had inner spring mattresses. They were about that thick and we had two bunks, one above the other.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: The latrines were across this little road.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. It got to be pretty darn cold -
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.
MR. TEWES: -- in wintertime.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.
MR. TEWES: Well, I think that pretty well covers that.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right.
MR. TEWES: Audrey took a flight from Knoxville - her parents had driven down to Vero Beach and she spent two weeks there. This was in January of '46 and we got engaged in February, the last Monday in February of '46. I was discharged on the 28th of March. Went to work at K-25 SSV and where my Army salary as a T-4 had been $78.00 a month, I started making $250.00 a month.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. So you more than tripled.
MR. TEWES: But I had to agree and I knew I needed to do it anyway that I would get my degree. I had found that I was getting credit for the time I was in the Army Special Training Program at the University of Illinois. So, I had to go back to Upsala College for six weeks. I had mandatory classes in German and comparative religion and psychology.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. TEWES: Soon as I got back - oh, I stayed in the Guest House for two days.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. I paid a dollar and a half for a room and the important thing about it was that I had someplace I could lock things up.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: There was a latrine down the hall, community shower -
MR. MCDANIEL: Was this when you were discharged from the Army or when you came back?
MR. TEWES: No, this was after I came back -
MR. MCDANIEL: You came back from your studies.
MR. TEWES: No, it would have been in the summer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. TEWES: I discovered that in the Guest House you can buy a drink. They had a breakfast bar and whoever was serving breakfast asked if I'd like to have dinner. They were taking reservations -
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay -
MR. TEWES: -- so I said, "Yeah, dinner for two." Audrey came out and met me there and we made all the necessary wedding plans.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: She had the church reserved for the 24th.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: I discovered the difference between the various companies here. Tennessee Eastman allowed their employees to take time off without pay. So she took two weeks off whereas Carbide did not make that provision. They didn't even have a provision for time off to get married.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: Audrey was very close to Betty Hayes who had arranged that Thanksgiving dinner and when she explained the situation to me, she said that my division head agreed to give me a day off.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: And better than that, he'd allowed Larry Allen who was another one of my very close friends, to have -
MR. MCDANIEL: A day off?
MR. TEWES: -- a day sick. So I had a best man.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, there ya' go.
MR. TEWES: The way it worked was Thursday night after work we drove up to Grayson, Kentucky. God, it was an awful day. People who haven't driven 25W back when it was a two-lane road don't know what it was like. But we had, I guess, about a week and a half to plan. We knew that you had to get a Wasserman test to prove that you didn't have syphilis.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: So we went to Doctor P.M. Dings. His father and he both came to Oak Ridge soon after the military doctors left -
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what was his name?
MR. TEWES: Dings.
MR. MCDANIEL: D-I-N-G-S?
MR. TEWES: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Dings.
MR. TEWES: He'd been in the Coast Guard and we left the samples and he had talked to - he'd met with us individually.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: And he told me, he said, "Now, I have cut Audrey's hymen." He said, "It'll make your first night together a lot more comfortable."
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. TEWES: And he made sure that I understood that that meant she was a virgin.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Was that common? I'd never heard that before. Was that common?
MR. TEWES: Well, if you don't do it you're apt to have a lot of blood.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure, sure. Exactly.
MR. TEWES: But when we got up to the next - the morning before our wedding, about 10:00 we went over to the doctor's office and we discovered that Kentucky doesn't accept Tennessee. (Wasserman tests).
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my goodness. And you were getting married in Kentucky at her.
MR. TEWES: Well, it turned out it wasn't that bad because Doc Stovall's daughter married Audrey's brother.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. TEWES: So he called Mauric, her brother. Told him to get right over there and then he got on the phone to the King's Daughter Hospital in Ashland, Kentucky, the nurse, said he was maybe 30 miles away. About 4:00, why, we had passed the test, but I told Audrey, I said, "It doesn't do us any good. The county clerk's office -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is closed.
MR. TEWES: -- closed at noon. She said, "Bill, you don't understand how things work." Her dad was the Circuit Court Judge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. TEWES: So she said, "The Court Clerk is going to be happy to meet us after dinner."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: The next day we got married, went to Cincinnati.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really.
MR. TEWES: For that night was our honeymoon.
MR. MCDANIEL: That night? Oh my.
MR. TEWES: They had a brand new hotel there post-war. The following day we came back to Oak Ridge by train, the L&N has a flag stop out at Elza Gate that I don't think it functions there. I don't think it functioned more than maybe ten years after the war.
MR. MCDANIEL: But they would drop you off and pick you up there?
MR. TEWES: No. There was a Clinton bus.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. TEWES: That ran I think once an hour or once every half hour. So the train would pick you up or drop you off. There was a big flag.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. TEWES: That you'd wave and then you'd go down and wait for the bus. Just briefly, we got an apartment at Gastonia Hall.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. TEWES: At AHC. I guess it was AHC by then. Had refurbished four dormitories. We had a great big apartment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. So they had remodeled them and turned them into apartments, didn't they?
MR. TEWES: Right. We had post-war stove, refrigerator. It was very nice.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh. Well good.
MR. TEWES: And we earned that. People pretty much centered their life on friends from work and people in the same - well, either apartments or maybe a street.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: Audrey worked for two years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did she?
MR. TEWES: We essentially had very darn little money. After two years, she quit and when I came home, she was dressed to the nines. She said, "We are going to have a honeymoon." We had forgotten the Carbide savings plan and she, when she terminated, we got an unexpected $220.00.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Wow.
MR. TEWES: And that was a lot of money then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. TEWES: And we did. We had a marvelous honeymoon at St. Simon Island.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. TEWES: The King and Prince had just been refurbished. The Navy had used it during the War.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: Flying down there was a great experience. We used the - I think it was Southern Airways at the time. It was a DC-3. Two seats on one side; one on the other.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: You flew through the Smokey Mountains.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. About how many seats were on that plane total?
MR. TEWES: I think that it was eight times three.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well see, I flew the very first time and I'm going to tell you this. I never flew until I was 30 or in my early 30s. I never flew. The first time I flew, I came from Jacksonville, Florida to Knoxville. So I flew from Jacksonville to Charlotte on a big plane and then got on a little prop plane that had about eight rows of two seats on one side and one seat on the other -
MR. TEWES: That was a DC-3 -
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and it did. You flew through the Smokies. It was like you could reach down and touch them, but it was beautiful. It was gorgeous -
MR. TEWES: Oh yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: When I flew, it was the middle of October so it was the most gorgeous view I'd ever seen.
MR. TEWES: Well, we remember in particular it was the last week in September.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh.
MR. TEWES: This is after I retired.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: There was a saying here. I guess it still exists. That when you die it doesn't matter whether you're going up or down, you have got to change planes in Atlanta.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's exactly right.
MR. TEWES: We took a flight. I'm not sure of the particular - it was three seats on each side - up to Boston and the whole trip up, it was pretty much on the left side of the plane the mountains were on the side. It was just red.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah. Well let's finish this up. What else do you want to talk about?
MR. TEWES: Well, I want to talk about Audrey's experience at work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Let's talk about that.
MR. TEWES: There's been a lot of talk about discrimination against Blacks here. Some of it is by people who have no idea what this place was like back during the War. At Columbia University, I never saw a Black.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: There were very few Blacks who were qualified for a scientific job or a skilled labor job. There's one exception. The cement finishers were a skilled trade, controlled by a Black union. Little has been published about these men.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: But aside from that, there's been a lot made of the fact that the Blacks lived in hutments. They weren't the only ones that lived in hutments. There were about as many White men who lived in hutments and I think there were some White couples. Most SED shift workers lived in hutments. The place where there is a real difference is the Black women.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: No White woman lived in a hutment. There are a number of White women who were not qualified to get a dorm room. They all went off to surrounding communities. The White women were not permitted in White men's dormitories and vice versa. This was also true for the Black women.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: The average woman dormitory resident didn't want any men in their dormitory. So, there were some cases, as a matter of fact, there were cases where somebody was in business and would have quite a few men in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: But they didn't last very long.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. I understand.
MR. TEWES: But a number of White women were arrested for visiting their husband in a men's dormitory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: In the case of the Black women who were married, they used a chain link fence to keep them separated and that is a very legitimate complaint that they have. The White women have another very legitimate complaint and that is salary. Audrey had a college - a bachelor's degree. She was hired to work in her field and she started in at 77 1/2 cents an hour. A day laborer made 57 cents an hour. I know that well, you may have done his interview, but a good friend told me without mentioning the actual salaries, that his wife was on weekly payroll whereas a male was on monthly. There's a sizable difference for two people doing the same work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: Now after about a year Audrey got a raise of 5 cents an hour, but then in December of '45, she got a raise to I think the high 90 cents an hour and I believe $1.10 in March of '46.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: On our wedding day she got bumped to a dollar -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Take your hand down, Bill. There we go. That's all right.
MR. TEWES: Bad habits.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay. It's just that's where the microphone is.
MR. TEWES: Pardon?
MR. MCDANIEL: That's where the microphone is.
MR. TEWES: Oh, okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was rubbing that. Well tell me about her work a little bit, what she did.
MR. TEWES: Okay. I've mentioned her work and it only lasted for about six months in employment. She took a two-week vacation right around the Fourth of July in '45 and when she came back, they told her they were transferring her to Beta 3. That they needed additional statisticians.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. TEWES: Well, from what I've heard, now she was not qualified as a statistician, but she and Peggy Grady were given instructions, a sort of on-the-job-training proposition -
MR. MCDANIEL: She and who?
MR. TEWES: Peggy Grady. Hal and Peggy Grady were -
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Peggy Grady, okay.
MR. TEWES: Yeah. They were good friends of ours. He was a physicist at Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL: So she and Peggy went over there and got kind of on-the-job-training.
MR. TEWES: Yeah. Apparently, it was pretty much in-depth. They essentially worked for H. Willard Alstrum. Bill Alstrum was an SED with a BS in statistics from the University of Minnesota. Audrey said that he spoke with a tough New York accent. If you're over here, he'd talk out that side of his mouth and vice versa. She said that a few months after she got there one of her jobs was to go all over Beta 3 and pick up raw information. She said that one of the supervisors down there told her he'd give her a job as a foreman. Well, she thought that was a pretty good deal and she came up and told Bill about it and she said, "And I discovered that he had an outstanding vocabulary of bad words." He said, "He didn't use them to me, but he got on the phone and everybody throughout the office could hear him talking about this supervisor." Said, "Then he came back and told me that I could be his supervisor and go on shift work and not make any more than I was making now" and he said, "And how long do you think you keep your boyfriend if you're on shift work."
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my.
MR. TEWES: But I'm not going to get into any detail on this at all, but I just want to simply say that Audrey told me and I heard this from other people that there was a real problem with unwanted touching is the way she put it -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: And it seemed to be ignored by the management.
MR. MCDANIEL: Hm.
MR. TEWES: But women were definitely second class at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: Now I've been involved in affirmative action since - well maybe ten years or so after I started working and there was a very strong affirmative action activity here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: Roger Hibbs is probably the most significant manager on this issue. He sure brought a lot of Blacks, a lot of women into better jobs and he was exceedingly smart. He was the first head of the Nuclear Division. He made it very clear to all of us that we weren't to hire unqualified people. This brought a lot of criticism early on because all we're hiring was laborers, janitors, but we were quite successful in improving things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well good.
MR. TEWES: Now there was a definite difference that would be - we'd encounter hiring freezes every once in a while. We might still be allowed to hire Blacks, but not women or Orientals.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. TEWES: During those freezes.
MR. MCDANIEL: During those freezes.
MR. TEWES: The Blacks got preference.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: But they were very hard to find. I had the very good fortune. I was a section head at the time. Worked in 1401 and I got a call from one of my young engineers and he discovered that we just had a young, Black co-op student assigned to us. I'm tellin' ya', if you wanted to go select a person in the initial phases of the AA you couldn't have done better than Harold Conner.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. TEWES: He was at U.T. Martin at the time. His father was principal of the U.T. Martin High School.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: And his mother taught English; he was very smart and we had him for, I guess, about two years. We were successful in recruiting him and when I retired, he called me up and he was at that time the President and General Manager of K-25.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Well he's on my list of people to interview to do oral history -
MR. TEWES: Well, I've been trying to get him to -
MR. MCDANIEL: I've called -
MR. TEWES: I recommended him back over a year ago.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Well he's on the list. He's on the priority list so I'm trying to get in touch with him. Well good. Well Bill, I think that probably wraps up our time and I appreciate you taking the time to move ahead and talk a little bit more about you and your wife's relationship and some of the other things.
MR. TEWES: Can I --?
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: -- tell one -
MR. MCDANIEL: One more story.
MR. TEWES: One more story. I mentioned that Audrey retired in June of 1948.
MR. MCDANIEL: '48.
MR. TEWES: One of our goals was to have a family.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: And we were successful. Very soon after, she terminated, and started a family and the night before the gate opening ceremony -
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah, yeah.
MR. TEWES: There was an older couple who lived below us and they had come up and we were having drinks and talking about our plans for going to the gate opening ceremony -
MR. MCDANIEL: To the gate opening. Now that was March the 19th?
MR. TEWES: March the 19th -
MR. MCDANIEL: 1949.
MR. TEWES: I'm referring to March the 18th in the evening -
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: And their name was Bill and Myrtle Bracey. Bill and I were sitting on the couch and they were on the dining room table talking.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how far along was your wife? Was she - she was?
MR. TEWES: Three weeks.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh. Had three more weeks to wait.
MR. TEWES: Yeah. Well, Myrtle said, "Hey guys, gotta change in plans." She gave me 15 minutes to collect some things to read and snacks and stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: And they took us down to the maternity room.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: I was surprised. About a half an hour later when Bob Ellison came in. He said, "Evelyn sent me down here to hold your hand for a while." He also had a flask with him.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did he? Okay. There ya' go.
MR. TEWES: After about an hour I told him, I said, "Bob, I think this is gonna last forever. If you leave the flask, why don't you go on home."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. TEWES: He said, "Now, you be sure you don't drink that all right away", he said. "Part of that is supposed to wet the baby's head."
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my.
MR. TEWES: Dr. Dings came in. Audrey told me afterwards, she said, "He was in trouble. The nurse called him and said, "You've got a patient here who's having twins.' He said, "Oh no.' He said, "She has been joking about that all through her pregnancy." And the delivery room nurse said, "Doctor, I am listening to two heartbeats."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: But I didn't know anything about that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: She actually fell asleep for a while, but about I'd say 4:30 Dr. Dings came in and said, "Bill, you've got a beautiful daughter" and then he said, "Bill, you've got a second beautiful daughter."
MR. MCDANIEL: So they were born the morning that they opened the gates to the city of Oak Ridge.
MR. TEWES: Right. They were the last two born behind the fence.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? My goodness. That was March 19, 1949.
MR. TEWES: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Well that's something special. So, all right. Well thank you, Bill. Appreciate it. Appreciate you taking the time.
MR. TEWES: Well, I always enjoy talking about those old times.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well good, good.
[End of Interview]
[Editor’s Note: At Mr. Tewes request, several portions of this transcript have been edited. The corresponding video interview has not been edited.]

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

ORAL HISTORY OF WILLIAM (BILL) TEWES
PART 2
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
December 5, 2011
MR. MCDANIEL: All right. This is Keith McDaniel and today is December the 5th 2011. We're at the home of Mr. Bill Tewes once again. We were here some few months ago and got part of this interview done and oral history done and we're here to finish it up. Are you ready to finish it up?
MR. TEWES: I sure am.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Now do you remember where we stopped last time?
MR. TEWES: Well, we got me to Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: We did get you to Oak Ridge.
MR. TEWES: And I was - I had spent my first I think five weeks at K-25 doing leak testing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes.
MR. TEWES: I was on shift work and I guess the thing I didn't comment on was if you were on shift work the whole city was functioning almost 24 hours a day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because a lot of people worked shifts, didn't they?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. I can recall one day in SED - maybe I better explain that to people who just see this one. I was a member of the Special Engineer Detachment 9812. There were I think around 1,500 of us. Our roster was 12 something, but there were a lot of people off roster.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh. Is that right?
MR. TEWES: We all were technically trained and we worked in all four of the plants and also at the Castle on the Hill as technical personnel.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: We were all enlisted men. Maybe about half of us had promotions to various levels.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. But you had special skills. That's the reason that you were there because you had special technical skills that the Army thought was important to the project and that's the reason you were here.
MR. TEWES: We had two different groups. They got here two different ways. There was a smaller group who had been working at one of the plants or one of the feeder plants and they got drafted. They gave them about four weeks to teach them the basics of being in the Army.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: And then ship them back here. Well Dick Lord was one of them. Dick mentioned, he said, "We all came back and we all had very low seniority." The other group was selected from the Army's - the Army does a very good job during the induction period in shaping the individuals' skills and they also gave everybody an AGCT test, Army General Classification Test. It was like an ACT or something like that -
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Kind of a standardized test to see where your strengths were.
MR. TEWES: We were smart. The average AGCT was 133. I've seen some statements that we were smarter than the officers here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, it wouldn't surprise me.
MR. TEWES: Although probably 90 percent of them were in the reserve, had very responsible jobs in peacetime and they were able to fit right in. They were an excellent group.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well good.
MR. TEWES: Now I forgot where I was -
MR. MCDANIEL: I think before we got to where you met your wife. We got to that point where you had met your wife at a dance I believe.
MR. TEWES: Yeah. Actually, I met Olive Belle Littleton on Thanksgiving of 1945.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. You told us that story. I remember that now.
MR. TEWES: Okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: I remember that story.
MR. TEWES: That's a good point to let me continue that story.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right. Good.
MR. TEWES: I had dated her every day for the week after that dance and she told me that she had a date Tuesday night. I asked her, I said, "Are we still on for the big SED formal dinner dance?" She sort of lightened up and said, "Bill, if you'd like we're on for Monday night and Wednesday night and Thursday night and the big SED dinner dance on Friday night." We couldn't rent the Grove on Saturday. That was the big dance every week, but this was a big deal. Now, we got corsages from Evelyn's Florist that was located at Town Site and the girls either had long dresses or very dressy dresses. I know - did I get from Olive to Audrey? Which is what I call their -
MR. MCDANIEL: I don't think so.
MR. TEWES: Okay. Let me take a second for that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: The first dance I went to with her, there was a GI there who had a terrific line and he came over and said to me, "Bill, I don't know how you do it. You had a good lookin' blonde last week and here you've got a great improvement." Audrey was obviously impressed. And he said, "May I dance with your date?" I said, "Sure, Tony." Ollie started to tell him what her name was. Said, "I know her name. Her name is Audrey, little Audrey." There was a comic book.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: And she looked just like the girl -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: She had short, black hair, good-looking face. So, when she came back she told me, she said, "Boy, if I'm ever feelin' down, if I could get one dance my morale would be improved." But after the break, why, I said, "Wanna dance, Audrey?" And she obviously liked the name. So that's how she became Audrey.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. What I found out about her and names was she started working here on - well, I don't have the precise date, but it was during January of '44.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Okay.
MR. TEWES: She worked for - she had gone through college at Eastern Kentucky in about three years. She went summer schools and graduated in - it would have been December of '43.
MR. MCDANIEL: '43, right.
MR. TEWES: Her clearance was completed and she came down here in January '44.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now where did she work?
MR. TEWES: She worked for Tennessee Eastman in their employment department, which was located in Town Site where the Tunnell Building is now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: She was in a section that was called Travel Allowance. Whenever they hired people here, they seemed to always promise them a house that hadn't even been designed -
MR. MCDANIEL: Built. Exactly.
MR. TEWES: As a result, they got extra funds to provide not just for their living, but to provide for their family's living --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: -- in another location.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: They were - every one of them when they filled out their expense account stretched as far as they could.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. TEWES: There's a group there. There was Audrey, you may have heard of or met Evelyn Ellingson.
MR. MCDANIEL: Hm-mm.
MR. TEWES: I know that she did an oral history, both her and Bob, I think in Washington. The only other one I know of that group was a fella' called Murphy Smith, but they - Audrey would have been very good at that. When it came to numbers, she just seemed never to make a mistake and she was very competitive. Well, I think that this is a good point to talk about the organization here about the plant management. The Manhattan Project assigned a senior engineer to each one of the four plants here in Oak Ridge and they went out and they hired major corporations to design them, another one to build them, sometimes they did both, and to operate them in Oak Ridge, Tennessee Eastman was the operating contractor at Y-12. Union Carbide was at K-25. The University of Chicago started at X-10 and then Monsanto took over and a lot of the management came from the University of Chicago and worked on there. H. J. Ferguson was the construction contractor for S-50. S-50 seems to be forgotten these days, but it provided a very valuable partial enrichment that could be fed directly into the beta units at Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: They decided that Fercleve would operate it, the Manhattan Project did and to avoid a potential union problem they formed a wholly owned subsidiary called Fer for Ferguson and Cleve for Cleveland where the home office was. The interesting thing about Ferguson is that they were given an almost impossible schedule.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. And that was a large facility. It was big. S-50 was big.
MR. TEWES: It was big. Ferguson was a very large architect/engineering firm.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: The CEO of Ferguson, Mr. Ferguson, had died about five or six months before they were contacted and his wife had taken over as CEO. She was in charge of all the operations in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: I have never ever seen her first name mentioned. The AEC and its following organizations and the government have always pushed affirmative action. Here's a case where you have a woman who's successful at a time when none of them were.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. And nobody even talks about her.
MR. TEWES: Nobody even pays any attention.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'd never heard that story before. I didn't know. So she was in charge of - she was basically in charge of the building of S-50, wasn't she?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. She came down here with her chief engineer. Colonel Nichols had a set of drawings that Groves had gotten from the Navy that initiated the thing and I'm not sure. I think Groves actually selected Ferguson.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. TEWES: He'd had previous experience.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. He'd just finished building the Pentagon so I'm sure he worked with everybody, didn't he.
MR. TEWES: But I think really in Oak Ridge we suffer from the fact that the DOE doesn't have a few historians that can dig into things like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: But so anyway, so they built S-50. They had what? Ninety days to build it?
MR. TEWES: It was 90 days to - it was started before it was finished.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: This is a good example of how what you read in the books today isn't necessarily accurate.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. TEWES: I've got it over here somewhere.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's alright. Let's just talk about it.
MR. TEWES: Okay. Well, here's a history, historic photos of the Manhattan Project. Anthony Joseph came here and gave a paper on this at the Museum about three years ago. It was very interesting. I think that he didn't deliberately make this mistake, but he probably looked into some of the literature that was incorrect already, but he makes a statement in his book that it never really worked well and it had to be shut down. The real story is that it started up in September I believe and in - that would have been '44 - and in December, they shut it down because it had a tremendous number of steam leaks.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: And they welded them closed and from then on it really had no moving parts and it just worked perfectly. Colonel Nichols estimated that it saved - it shortened the War by nine days.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: The AEC historians, the first group in their summary, The New World, estimated about a week. People today probably don't know what a week meant to people -
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure.
MR. TEWES: -- back then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: But I was back, courted my wife when I got off on that side.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. I understand.
MR. TEWES: We just really hit it off at that dance. I had a date for Sunday and on Sunday, my two best friends were Larry O'Rourke and Art Kilman. Larry started. Larry was - he came by the O'Rourke name naturally. He made friends with everyone and somehow or other he had met a couple, John Graham Smith, went by Gray, was an SED at Tennessee Eastman. If you wanted to live together with your wife and you were a member of the SED, she had to get a job here and find a room in someone's house.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: And then the SED would permit you to move to that house from the (barracks or) dorm, but they would not give you funds for quarters.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: Which they did provide at Columbia for me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. Because they didn't have any housing --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: Well, on Sundays we went to lunch at the - boy, my brain is showing its age.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's alright.
MR. TEWES: The Hughes, Mom and Pop Hughes and their son Ladd was a teenager.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really.
MR. TEWES: Live right across the street from here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really.
MR. TEWES: On the first house in on the right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really.
MR. TEWES: C house.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh. Yeah.
MR. TEWES: I guess we went riding -
MR. MCDANIEL: So you and your buddies went for lunch there on Sundays.
MR. TEWES: Well, the Hughes' had horses.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. TEWES: They were stabled outside Elza Gate. We went riding and I got there I think about ten minutes late and Audrey showed up - I was supposed to be there at 5. I think about 5:35 or something and the first words she said were, "You smell like a stable." She proceeded to take my shoes and come back.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Oh my.
MR. TEWES: But then she said, "You're late." I said, "My gosh, you didn't show up till 35 minutes after." She said, "If you weren't late I would have started getting ready sooner." That was about the only significant problem we had. And finally I was able to get through to her that she could be late any other time, but that it's bad form to go down the aisle after the bride.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: And you really should get to funerals a half an hour on time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: But the next night -
MR. MCDANIEL: Hey Bill, take your hand down if you don't mind.
MR. TEWES: Oh, I'm sorry.
MR. MCDANIEL: It's okay.
MR. TEWES: The next night she said, "Let's go get a hot chocolate out at East Village." Well, us SEDs, we didn't get around much of the town. We'd go to Town Site to the movies. We'd go to dances at the Grove or at Town Site or the Town Site Tennis Courts. We were encouraged to stay away from Jefferson. We had a local paper, the SED News. They used to call it the Jefferson Brawl Hall.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right.
MR. TEWES: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. That one was kind of rough?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. But -
MR. MCDANIEL: So she wanted to go get hot chocolate at the East Village.
MR. TEWES: Yeah. Well, I saw the Elm Grove stores and I said, "Well there we are." Audrey was amazed. She said, "Don't you ever get out in town?" I said, "No." She said, "Well we aren't even halfway there." It was out in East Village.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: But I also found that she really enjoyed walking. So the next night I wasn't going to get caught walking in the - it was a period when there weren't good movies.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: So I said, "Let's go to the Library." She looked at me like I was nuts, but she said, "Okay." When we got in the Library I - we got a couple of comfortable seats and I said, "I'll be right back." I went over and I got the Herald Tribune for myself and I got the Louisville Courier Journal for her. We had a great many different newspapers in the Library. More by far than we have today.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure. I'm sure because there were so many people from so many different places.
MR. TEWES: Right. And it had a very strong southern flavor to it, but I didn't know how much of a flavor I did because the Louisville Courier Journal, well, "The State" in South Carolina is the same way. It's a state paper.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. TEWES: And the obituaries are state wide --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. TEWES: So, we enjoyed reading the paper -
MR. MCDANIEL: Well good. Good.
MR. TEWES: -- for a while.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now when did y'all get married?
MR. TEWES: We got married in August of '46.
MR. MCDANIEL: '46. So let's talk a little bit about you courted and then the War was over. What happened then?
MR. TEWES: The end of that week I had suggested - oh, the end of that week she told me she had a date for Tuesday night. I had invited her to the SED formal. Well, I said, "Are we still on for that?" She said, "Well, if you like, we're on for Monday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, the SED dance on Friday." I was feeling lousy on Tuesday night knowing she was going out with someone else and Art Kilman found me in the PX drinking beer. Incidentally, our beer was 3.2 percent alcohol.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: The Army back before the beginning of the war, recognizing that they felt like there was going to be a war; they decided that all military bases would operate according to the local laws. For instance, that meant that we had segregation. There's nothing that the Corps of Engineers did about it or could do about it. It also meant that we were legally dry. I don't think there may have been a few people who went to a wet area often enough to get regular beer, but we may have been legally dry, but we were pretty darn wet when it came to liquor -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Sure. I understand -
MR. TEWES: If you're in the SED, your good buddies in the MP’s. The Army group that manned the gates, they'd never check one of us. Well, we courted and a few days after the SED dance and - well, it was after our - after the SED dance on Sunday. Audrey pulled out her dance card and I've got one around here somewhere. Here we - this was folded up and it says, "SED Dance 7 P.M. December 7th." I don't know of anybody who noticed the significance of December 7th, but there were a few signatures on it and one of them was from my good friend Larry O'Rourke and it said, "Apry Bill, moi." I felt that I better write something in French and this is what popped into my mind. Mon cur et tu tien. In other words, Larry said, "After Bill, me." I said, "My heart is always yours." Well, that Sunday night she said, "We need to talk about this." She waved it. I started to say, "Well Larry says" - she said, "I have had it translated by a young lady in Beacon Hall who used to teach French until she found she could make a lot more money as an operator out at Y-12 and she said, "And she is quite reliable. She isn't gonna tell anybody else about it." And she said, "She didn't just tell me that you said my heart is always yours. She said she gave me an interpretation that Larry said after Bill, me, and Bill said, ‘There's no after Bill." She said, "How do you intend to accomplish this?" And I said, "Well, the only way I can figure is I guess I have to marry you." She obviously had figured all this out -
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. TEWES: -- because she said, "Soldier, I'm not sayin' yes and I'm not sayin' no, but don't ask me again for a month."
MR. MCDANIEL: There ya' go.
MR. TEWES: I think I didn't wait a month, but she took her time about saying yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: Well, let me tell you about the day after the dance.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I don't think they're going to let me go into this much personal detail. So we need to move it along.
MR. TEWES: This isn't personal detail, all right?
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. Good.
MR. TEWES: I'll stop the personal detail.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. That's fine.
MR. TEWES: The day after the dance, we all were hung over and at 8:00 that morning, that Saturday morning, we started moving from the barracks to the Jefferson dormitories.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really.
MR. TEWES: I'm mentioning this because I think there are very few people in this town that are aware of it. We had the four dorms at the Lincoln Circle and then in addition to that, we had three dorms on the Turnpike side of Jefferson Circle. We lost our maid service. We had to - they had a schedule for cleaning the hallways and the johns and nobody minded it at all. Our rooms were kept spic and span.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: The one thing that was a tremendous improvement, in the barracks we had - there's a lot that's been written about the fact we had inner spring mattresses. They were about that thick and we had two bunks, one above the other.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: The latrines were across this little road.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. It got to be pretty darn cold -
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.
MR. TEWES: -- in wintertime.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.
MR. TEWES: Well, I think that pretty well covers that.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right.
MR. TEWES: Audrey took a flight from Knoxville - her parents had driven down to Vero Beach and she spent two weeks there. This was in January of '46 and we got engaged in February, the last Monday in February of '46. I was discharged on the 28th of March. Went to work at K-25 SSV and where my Army salary as a T-4 had been $78.00 a month, I started making $250.00 a month.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. So you more than tripled.
MR. TEWES: But I had to agree and I knew I needed to do it anyway that I would get my degree. I had found that I was getting credit for the time I was in the Army Special Training Program at the University of Illinois. So, I had to go back to Upsala College for six weeks. I had mandatory classes in German and comparative religion and psychology.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. TEWES: Soon as I got back - oh, I stayed in the Guest House for two days.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you?
MR. TEWES: Yeah. I paid a dollar and a half for a room and the important thing about it was that I had someplace I could lock things up.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: There was a latrine down the hall, community shower -
MR. MCDANIEL: Was this when you were discharged from the Army or when you came back?
MR. TEWES: No, this was after I came back -
MR. MCDANIEL: You came back from your studies.
MR. TEWES: No, it would have been in the summer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. TEWES: I discovered that in the Guest House you can buy a drink. They had a breakfast bar and whoever was serving breakfast asked if I'd like to have dinner. They were taking reservations -
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay -
MR. TEWES: -- so I said, "Yeah, dinner for two." Audrey came out and met me there and we made all the necessary wedding plans.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: She had the church reserved for the 24th.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: I discovered the difference between the various companies here. Tennessee Eastman allowed their employees to take time off without pay. So she took two weeks off whereas Carbide did not make that provision. They didn't even have a provision for time off to get married.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: Audrey was very close to Betty Hayes who had arranged that Thanksgiving dinner and when she explained the situation to me, she said that my division head agreed to give me a day off.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: And better than that, he'd allowed Larry Allen who was another one of my very close friends, to have -
MR. MCDANIEL: A day off?
MR. TEWES: -- a day sick. So I had a best man.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, there ya' go.
MR. TEWES: The way it worked was Thursday night after work we drove up to Grayson, Kentucky. God, it was an awful day. People who haven't driven 25W back when it was a two-lane road don't know what it was like. But we had, I guess, about a week and a half to plan. We knew that you had to get a Wasserman test to prove that you didn't have syphilis.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: So we went to Doctor P.M. Dings. His father and he both came to Oak Ridge soon after the military doctors left -
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what was his name?
MR. TEWES: Dings.
MR. MCDANIEL: D-I-N-G-S?
MR. TEWES: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Dings.
MR. TEWES: He'd been in the Coast Guard and we left the samples and he had talked to - he'd met with us individually.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: And he told me, he said, "Now, I have cut Audrey's hymen." He said, "It'll make your first night together a lot more comfortable."
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. TEWES: And he made sure that I understood that that meant she was a virgin.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Was that common? I'd never heard that before. Was that common?
MR. TEWES: Well, if you don't do it you're apt to have a lot of blood.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure, sure. Exactly.
MR. TEWES: But when we got up to the next - the morning before our wedding, about 10:00 we went over to the doctor's office and we discovered that Kentucky doesn't accept Tennessee. (Wasserman tests).
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my goodness. And you were getting married in Kentucky at her.
MR. TEWES: Well, it turned out it wasn't that bad because Doc Stovall's daughter married Audrey's brother.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. TEWES: So he called Mauric, her brother. Told him to get right over there and then he got on the phone to the King's Daughter Hospital in Ashland, Kentucky, the nurse, said he was maybe 30 miles away. About 4:00, why, we had passed the test, but I told Audrey, I said, "It doesn't do us any good. The county clerk's office -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is closed.
MR. TEWES: -- closed at noon. She said, "Bill, you don't understand how things work." Her dad was the Circuit Court Judge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. TEWES: So she said, "The Court Clerk is going to be happy to meet us after dinner."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: The next day we got married, went to Cincinnati.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really.
MR. TEWES: For that night was our honeymoon.
MR. MCDANIEL: That night? Oh my.
MR. TEWES: They had a brand new hotel there post-war. The following day we came back to Oak Ridge by train, the L&N has a flag stop out at Elza Gate that I don't think it functions there. I don't think it functioned more than maybe ten years after the war.
MR. MCDANIEL: But they would drop you off and pick you up there?
MR. TEWES: No. There was a Clinton bus.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. TEWES: That ran I think once an hour or once every half hour. So the train would pick you up or drop you off. There was a big flag.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. TEWES: That you'd wave and then you'd go down and wait for the bus. Just briefly, we got an apartment at Gastonia Hall.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. TEWES: At AHC. I guess it was AHC by then. Had refurbished four dormitories. We had a great big apartment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. So they had remodeled them and turned them into apartments, didn't they?
MR. TEWES: Right. We had post-war stove, refrigerator. It was very nice.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh. Well good.
MR. TEWES: And we earned that. People pretty much centered their life on friends from work and people in the same - well, either apartments or maybe a street.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: Audrey worked for two years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did she?
MR. TEWES: We essentially had very darn little money. After two years, she quit and when I came home, she was dressed to the nines. She said, "We are going to have a honeymoon." We had forgotten the Carbide savings plan and she, when she terminated, we got an unexpected $220.00.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Wow.
MR. TEWES: And that was a lot of money then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. TEWES: And we did. We had a marvelous honeymoon at St. Simon Island.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. TEWES: The King and Prince had just been refurbished. The Navy had used it during the War.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: Flying down there was a great experience. We used the - I think it was Southern Airways at the time. It was a DC-3. Two seats on one side; one on the other.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: You flew through the Smokey Mountains.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. About how many seats were on that plane total?
MR. TEWES: I think that it was eight times three.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well see, I flew the very first time and I'm going to tell you this. I never flew until I was 30 or in my early 30s. I never flew. The first time I flew, I came from Jacksonville, Florida to Knoxville. So I flew from Jacksonville to Charlotte on a big plane and then got on a little prop plane that had about eight rows of two seats on one side and one seat on the other -
MR. TEWES: That was a DC-3 -
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and it did. You flew through the Smokies. It was like you could reach down and touch them, but it was beautiful. It was gorgeous -
MR. TEWES: Oh yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: When I flew, it was the middle of October so it was the most gorgeous view I'd ever seen.
MR. TEWES: Well, we remember in particular it was the last week in September.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh.
MR. TEWES: This is after I retired.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: There was a saying here. I guess it still exists. That when you die it doesn't matter whether you're going up or down, you have got to change planes in Atlanta.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's exactly right.
MR. TEWES: We took a flight. I'm not sure of the particular - it was three seats on each side - up to Boston and the whole trip up, it was pretty much on the left side of the plane the mountains were on the side. It was just red.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah. Well let's finish this up. What else do you want to talk about?
MR. TEWES: Well, I want to talk about Audrey's experience at work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Let's talk about that.
MR. TEWES: There's been a lot of talk about discrimination against Blacks here. Some of it is by people who have no idea what this place was like back during the War. At Columbia University, I never saw a Black.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: There were very few Blacks who were qualified for a scientific job or a skilled labor job. There's one exception. The cement finishers were a skilled trade, controlled by a Black union. Little has been published about these men.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: But aside from that, there's been a lot made of the fact that the Blacks lived in hutments. They weren't the only ones that lived in hutments. There were about as many White men who lived in hutments and I think there were some White couples. Most SED shift workers lived in hutments. The place where there is a real difference is the Black women.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: No White woman lived in a hutment. There are a number of White women who were not qualified to get a dorm room. They all went off to surrounding communities. The White women were not permitted in White men's dormitories and vice versa. This was also true for the Black women.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: The average woman dormitory resident didn't want any men in their dormitory. So, there were some cases, as a matter of fact, there were cases where somebody was in business and would have quite a few men in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: But they didn't last very long.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. I understand.
MR. TEWES: But a number of White women were arrested for visiting their husband in a men's dormitory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: In the case of the Black women who were married, they used a chain link fence to keep them separated and that is a very legitimate complaint that they have. The White women have another very legitimate complaint and that is salary. Audrey had a college - a bachelor's degree. She was hired to work in her field and she started in at 77 1/2 cents an hour. A day laborer made 57 cents an hour. I know that well, you may have done his interview, but a good friend told me without mentioning the actual salaries, that his wife was on weekly payroll whereas a male was on monthly. There's a sizable difference for two people doing the same work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: Now after about a year Audrey got a raise of 5 cents an hour, but then in December of '45, she got a raise to I think the high 90 cents an hour and I believe $1.10 in March of '46.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: On our wedding day she got bumped to a dollar -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Take your hand down, Bill. There we go. That's all right.
MR. TEWES: Bad habits.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay. It's just that's where the microphone is.
MR. TEWES: Pardon?
MR. MCDANIEL: That's where the microphone is.
MR. TEWES: Oh, okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was rubbing that. Well tell me about her work a little bit, what she did.
MR. TEWES: Okay. I've mentioned her work and it only lasted for about six months in employment. She took a two-week vacation right around the Fourth of July in '45 and when she came back, they told her they were transferring her to Beta 3. That they needed additional statisticians.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. TEWES: Well, from what I've heard, now she was not qualified as a statistician, but she and Peggy Grady were given instructions, a sort of on-the-job-training proposition -
MR. MCDANIEL: She and who?
MR. TEWES: Peggy Grady. Hal and Peggy Grady were -
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Peggy Grady, okay.
MR. TEWES: Yeah. They were good friends of ours. He was a physicist at Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL: So she and Peggy went over there and got kind of on-the-job-training.
MR. TEWES: Yeah. Apparently, it was pretty much in-depth. They essentially worked for H. Willard Alstrum. Bill Alstrum was an SED with a BS in statistics from the University of Minnesota. Audrey said that he spoke with a tough New York accent. If you're over here, he'd talk out that side of his mouth and vice versa. She said that a few months after she got there one of her jobs was to go all over Beta 3 and pick up raw information. She said that one of the supervisors down there told her he'd give her a job as a foreman. Well, she thought that was a pretty good deal and she came up and told Bill about it and she said, "And I discovered that he had an outstanding vocabulary of bad words." He said, "He didn't use them to me, but he got on the phone and everybody throughout the office could hear him talking about this supervisor." Said, "Then he came back and told me that I could be his supervisor and go on shift work and not make any more than I was making now" and he said, "And how long do you think you keep your boyfriend if you're on shift work."
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my.
MR. TEWES: But I'm not going to get into any detail on this at all, but I just want to simply say that Audrey told me and I heard this from other people that there was a real problem with unwanted touching is the way she put it -
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: And it seemed to be ignored by the management.
MR. MCDANIEL: Hm.
MR. TEWES: But women were definitely second class at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: Now I've been involved in affirmative action since - well maybe ten years or so after I started working and there was a very strong affirmative action activity here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: Roger Hibbs is probably the most significant manager on this issue. He sure brought a lot of Blacks, a lot of women into better jobs and he was exceedingly smart. He was the first head of the Nuclear Division. He made it very clear to all of us that we weren't to hire unqualified people. This brought a lot of criticism early on because all we're hiring was laborers, janitors, but we were quite successful in improving things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well good.
MR. TEWES: Now there was a definite difference that would be - we'd encounter hiring freezes every once in a while. We might still be allowed to hire Blacks, but not women or Orientals.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. TEWES: During those freezes.
MR. MCDANIEL: During those freezes.
MR. TEWES: The Blacks got preference.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: But they were very hard to find. I had the very good fortune. I was a section head at the time. Worked in 1401 and I got a call from one of my young engineers and he discovered that we just had a young, Black co-op student assigned to us. I'm tellin' ya', if you wanted to go select a person in the initial phases of the AA you couldn't have done better than Harold Conner.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. TEWES: He was at U.T. Martin at the time. His father was principal of the U.T. Martin High School.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. TEWES: And his mother taught English; he was very smart and we had him for, I guess, about two years. We were successful in recruiting him and when I retired, he called me up and he was at that time the President and General Manager of K-25.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Well he's on my list of people to interview to do oral history -
MR. TEWES: Well, I've been trying to get him to -
MR. MCDANIEL: I've called -
MR. TEWES: I recommended him back over a year ago.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Well he's on the list. He's on the priority list so I'm trying to get in touch with him. Well good. Well Bill, I think that probably wraps up our time and I appreciate you taking the time to move ahead and talk a little bit more about you and your wife's relationship and some of the other things.
MR. TEWES: Can I --?
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: -- tell one -
MR. MCDANIEL: One more story.
MR. TEWES: One more story. I mentioned that Audrey retired in June of 1948.
MR. MCDANIEL: '48.
MR. TEWES: One of our goals was to have a family.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: And we were successful. Very soon after, she terminated, and started a family and the night before the gate opening ceremony -
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah, yeah.
MR. TEWES: There was an older couple who lived below us and they had come up and we were having drinks and talking about our plans for going to the gate opening ceremony -
MR. MCDANIEL: To the gate opening. Now that was March the 19th?
MR. TEWES: March the 19th -
MR. MCDANIEL: 1949.
MR. TEWES: I'm referring to March the 18th in the evening -
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: And their name was Bill and Myrtle Bracey. Bill and I were sitting on the couch and they were on the dining room table talking.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how far along was your wife? Was she - she was?
MR. TEWES: Three weeks.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh. Had three more weeks to wait.
MR. TEWES: Yeah. Well, Myrtle said, "Hey guys, gotta change in plans." She gave me 15 minutes to collect some things to read and snacks and stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. TEWES: And they took us down to the maternity room.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: I was surprised. About a half an hour later when Bob Ellison came in. He said, "Evelyn sent me down here to hold your hand for a while." He also had a flask with him.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did he? Okay. There ya' go.
MR. TEWES: After about an hour I told him, I said, "Bob, I think this is gonna last forever. If you leave the flask, why don't you go on home."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. TEWES: He said, "Now, you be sure you don't drink that all right away", he said. "Part of that is supposed to wet the baby's head."
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my.
MR. TEWES: Dr. Dings came in. Audrey told me afterwards, she said, "He was in trouble. The nurse called him and said, "You've got a patient here who's having twins.' He said, "Oh no.' He said, "She has been joking about that all through her pregnancy." And the delivery room nurse said, "Doctor, I am listening to two heartbeats."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. TEWES: But I didn't know anything about that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. TEWES: She actually fell asleep for a while, but about I'd say 4:30 Dr. Dings came in and said, "Bill, you've got a beautiful daughter" and then he said, "Bill, you've got a second beautiful daughter."
MR. MCDANIEL: So they were born the morning that they opened the gates to the city of Oak Ridge.
MR. TEWES: Right. They were the last two born behind the fence.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? My goodness. That was March 19, 1949.
MR. TEWES: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Well that's something special. So, all right. Well thank you, Bill. Appreciate it. Appreciate you taking the time.
MR. TEWES: Well, I always enjoy talking about those old times.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well good, good.
[End of Interview]
[Editor’s Note: At Mr. Tewes request, several portions of this transcript have been edited. The corresponding video interview has not been edited.]